M://MIND-MORE
Summary
Mind more is a mental health application that serves as a progress report for individuals who are looking to understand their psychological state better. This application is intended to be a one-stop shop for people to keep track of their daily moods, take note of their thoughts, and improve their overall understanding of their own mind. Being able to reflect on one’s mental state, journal daily feelings, and review logs of their emotions is accompanied by some fun and relaxing features such as being able to play with an interactive cat. These features are included since Mind More has been crafted to be an emotional well-being application that serves as a way to give the user space to ponder their thoughts in a relaxed way. Advancement reports allow clients to record the mental situations that they encounter. The application helps individuals to monitor their day-to-day temperaments, observe their thought processes, and work on their general comprehension of themselves.
Process
Mind More was a product birthed out of the direct collaboration between two other colleagues and myself. The app started out as a few sketches on a piece of paper and plenty of "Maybe this would be a good idea...nah" moments in our first meeting. Eventually we settled on what the general premise of the app would be and what core features it would contain. As we started brainstorming visually in Figma, some features expanded to where new features grew directly from them. Since we were making an app for mental health, we wanted it to be as inviting as possible and decided to include a flagship feature which was interactive kittens that would keep the end user company. There were some roadblocks as we tried to put together a glossary feature and therapist contact feature since both required quite a bit of research into the field of psychology and a little bit into the field of law due to medical information needing to be kept confidential.
Reflection
The Mind More project was another helpful step in making me efficient and comfortable working in a team. We were able to bounce ideas off one another, make compromises for better design solutions, be a second-pair of eyes for one another, and so much more. The biggest challenge that we faced was the scope that our project grew to in terms of making a live prototype. There were many meetings that went over time and sometimes the project was keeping us on the clock well into the midnight hours. Saunders, our team leader (they were not really our team leader but they felt like a great one), really went above and beyond, staying up on several nights to help duplicate every single function inside of Figma so that the live app demo was working with every single possibility which numbered in the hundreds. Working as a team on Mind More re-confirmed to me that working as a team can, when executed right, allow for greater ambitions and bigger design solutions.
